Tommy's Honor (8 page)

At half-past eleven the golfers walked to the first teeing-ground beside the twelfth hole’s putting-green. About a hundred spectators followed them—gentlemen golfers leading their wives and children, Prestwickers of all classes and occupations. Fairlie scanned the horizon, seeking omens in the weather. Tall, smiling Eglinton stood nearby, his hair flowing in the wind. Nine-year-old Tommy Morris slipped between gentlemen’s jackets and ladies’ frills to get a clear view of his father. As the home-club professional, Tom had the honor of teeing off first. He was favored to win. After all, he had built the course. He stood a few club lengths from the twelfth hole’s knee-high flag and waited while his caddie teed up a ball on a lump of wet sand. Tom took a last look at the fairway ahead—his Herculean first hole, well over a quarter-mile of turf—and began his tick-tock swing, the first swing in the history of major championship golf. At that moment, according to one account, a gust sent his tie up over his chin and momentarily blinded him. He managed to strike the ball soundly, but missed his target. He would struggle with his aim for most of the day.

Bob Andrew played next. The lanky, glum-faced crack Andrew was known as “The Rook” for his beady-eyed resemblance to a crow. He was second choice in the day’s betting. The Rook’s backers were delighted to take him at three-to-one odds. Andrew hit a low, skimming drive, then followed Tom past Goosedubs swamp along with their caddies and most of the spectators, including the gentleman marker who would keep their scores. Spectators in those days tracked their favorites from hole to hole rather than staying put and letting the golfers pass by. They tromped across putting-greens and often stood in bunkers if that helped them see the putting. No one raked bunkers during play; that would have seemed like cheating.

According to Prestwick’s club history, “generally there was a feeling that the Championship lay between Morris and Andrew.” Willie Park, the second pairing’s featured player, disagreed with the general feeling. Park made a slew of side bets, backing himself. Now twenty-seven years old, he had not mellowed since his spitfire days of challenging Allan and Tom in newspaper ads. A hero back home in Musselburgh, he was hissed in Gullane, near Edinburgh, the site of many future Opens held on the Muirfield links. Arriving in Gullane one day and finding no one willing to bet against him, Park took on the town’s best golfer in a money match while hopping on one leg. He won, then won another one-legged match while swinging one-handed, and strode out of town on both legs, counting his money with both hands. Yet he was only the bettors’ third choice at Prestwick; the smart money figured that Willie’s reckless style would hurt him in a medal-play event in which one wild spell or one unlucky hole could cost him the belt. Park got off to a strong start, launching a drive that one writer described as sounding “as if it had been shot from some rocket apparatus.”

On Tom’s epic first hole and the long uphill second, Park’s power tipped the balance in his favor. “At the commencement of the game the interest was concentrated in Tom Morris and the Rook, who were paired together,” the
Ayr Advertiser
reported, “but it very soon had become apparent that the struggle for supremacy would be betwixt Park and Tom Morris. Park made the best start, 4 ahead of Tom in the first two holes. At the end of the first round Park had scored 55, and Tom 58.” Both men shot 59 in the second round, leaving Park three strokes ahead. By then it was a two-man tournament. The Rook, a traditionalist who liked the feel of wood on ball—his irons had wooden inserts in their faces—faded fast. The low, skimming spoon shots he preferred were useless in Prestwick’s humps and hollows. Shots that would have earned him applause at Perth or St. Andrews struck dunes and rolled backward. The Rook would finish seventeen strokes behind.

As the final round unfolded, Park made a tidy four at Prestwick’s 400-yard fourth hole, where a stone wall crowded the back of the green. Tom, playing a minute ahead of his rival, kept finding his ball in the bunkers he had shored up with railway ties. “At this crisis the excitement waxed most intense,” one observer noted, adding that “frequenters of the Links will admit that in all their experience of Morris they never saw him come to grief so often.” But Tom kept grinding out fours and fives, whittling a stroke off Park’s lead, then another.

The sun fell toward the Isle of Arran, painting the sky purple and orange. At the last putting-green, Park had his chance to win or lose. His ball lay ten bumpy yards from the hole. Get it down in two and he would claim the Belt. But take three putts—a likely result from that distance—and he and Tom would play another round to break the tie. Now Tom, Fairlie, Eglinton, Lord Colville, the Rook, Tommy Morris and scores of others went silent as Park drew back his putter and sent his gutty on its way.

There were shouts and then cheers as the ball rolled, bounced and dived into the cup. The Belt went to Willie Park.

Tommy couldn’t believe it. The bad man had won.

The entire three-round event had taken five hours. In a brief ceremony afterward, the Earl of Eglinton presented the Belt to the champion. Tom Morris, standing a few paces away, applauded. He had lost fair and square.

Later that fall Park posed for his official photograph as the Champion Golfer of Scotland, wearing a satin bow tie and a houndstooth suit, one jaunty thumb under his lapel: Willie the Conqueror.

T
ommy loved to run. Down the beach he ran and up to the links, over and around the dunes, moving in and out of shadow and sun until he fell in a heap in the grass. He was the nemesis of the fat partridges and squawking, long-elbowed blue herons he flushed from the reeds that lined Pow Burn. Lying still where he fell, catching his breath, he smelled heather and salt air. He listened to bees. He heard birds carry on their girlish conversations, clicking and whistling in the weeds. He watched gulls ride air currents, peering down with their black pellet eyes. He watched clouds whose gray edges turned silver when the sun moved behind them, mile-high clouds shaped like sea monsters and ships’ sails, sheep and puffs of smoke from his father’s briar pipe. Springing to his feet, he chased rabbits that scooted to safety, their white tails zipping into high grass like bad golf shots.

Prestwick was his playground. The dunes were mountains and the bunkers were dungeons, black as night when the sun was low. When a train from Glasgow appeared behind the Tunnel Hole green, trailing a plume of white smoke, it looked like a toy. Now and then he knocked a scuffed golf ball around with the half-club his father had made for him. Golf was hatefully hard for a ten-year-old whose best shot went a hundred yards, but as he grew he got better and his father made him a set of cut-down clubs. At the age of eleven Tommy could chip and putt better than most of the club members who employed his father. Golf was hard but far more fun than playing with his sister, who could not skip or run in her knee-high boots, petticoats, and scratchy dresses. In any case Lizzie had household chores to do. As a girl of ten, she spent most of her day helping Mum cook and clean, picking up after Tommy and their little brother Jimmy, washing and folding the boys’ clothes and blacking their Sunday shoes. The boys’ only chore was reading Bible stories. Tommy did his Bible reading, then escaped.

On his links jaunts he ran up the lofty, grass-covered dunes called the Alps. Reaching the top he kicked sand out behind him like a buck rabbit. Better yet was the downhill. Every boy in town liked to lie sideways and roll down grassy hills, but running was more daring. From the top of the Alps he would lope down the path toward the first putting-green, gaining speed with every step. At the point where he reached top speed there was a spot where he could turn down a still-steeper hill. The pitch of this slope was almost forty degrees. He often fell on the way down, but in the brief stretch of time between running and falling, he felt he was flying.

His way home led from the links to cobbled streets. Tommy saw horses pulling coaches while dogs, goats, and ducks skipped out of the way. Laborers moved stones in wheelbarrows. Late in the day the air carried warm smells of biscuits, meat pies, and fish soup, as well as those of mud and horse dung. The greenkeeper’s son rounded a corner and faced the Red Lion Inn, a stone box with four chimney pots on top and a scarlet lion painted on one corner. The dragon-tailed beast stood upright, scratching air—the Lion Rampant of Scotland. Tommy remembered his father’s saying that the lion symbolized both Scotland and England, but the English lion was a carrion-eater.

The Red Lion’s double doors dwarfed a boy Tommy’s age. Poking his head inside, he could see gentlemen handing their hats, coats, and canes to a valet. The smoke of their cigars drifted to the door along with the scents of buttered beefsteak, meat pudding, and pies.

The Morris house was a minute’s run away. The Prestwick Golf Club paid five pounds a month to rent this cottage for its greenkeeper and his family. There were no beefsteaks cooking inside, but Nancy’s table was respectably stocked with fish and mutton, boiled turkey, carrots, and turnips. If Tommy was lucky there were stovies, too—potatoes and onions mixed with fat—or apple fritters. He would arrive to find his mother instructing Lizzie, whose job it was to help with plates and table settings while her younger brothers Jimmy and little Jack, the crippled one, watched. Five-year-old Jimmy might shout a greeting to Tommy and draw a stern look from their father, who sat beside an oil lamp reading his Bible. Tom Morris owned many books but read only two, his Bible and his Burns, and Robert Burns’s poems ran a distant second to the black book with its frayed ribbon and crackling, threadbare spine. Each evening Tom read Bible verses aloud to the rest of them.
Let us be worthy
, he prayed before dinner. Worthy of what? Tommy wondered. Was two-year-old Jack unworthy? Was that why he couldn’t walk or stand, but only pull himself along the ground with his arms? It was hard to fathom a God who would punish little Jack.

The Morris house and its contents were valued at £80 by the Scottish Union Insurance Company. Each spring the treasurer of the Prestwick Golf Club paid fifteen shillings to insure the cottage and its “furniture, bed and table linen, wearing apparel…golf clubs, brass tools and such like things.” The insurance agent didn’t measure the looking glass over the mantel, which was taller than it was wide, a sign of the good taste Nancy had acquired working in Captain Broughton’s house. The mantelpiece held flowers and a clock covered by a bell jar to protect it from the soot in the air. Tommy thought the mantelpiece would be a fine place to put the Championship Belt once his father won it away from Willie Park.

Tom’s next chance to win the Belt came in 1861. That year’s tournament was the first true Open: It was “open to all the world,” cracks and gentlemen alike. Eight amateur golfers, unimpressed with Park’s winning score the previous year, reckoned they could give the cracks a run for the Belt. The amateurs included Colonel J.O. Fairlie, a fact that brought Tommy close to a sort of blasphemy: speaking ill of the Colonel. “He thinks he can beat you, Da!” But Tom only smiled. If he couldn’t beat the Colonel over three rounds on a course he had built himself, he said, then the world was surely upside down.

The event’s growing fame led the Dunn twins, Willie and Jamie, to make the two-day trip from Blackheath, near London, where Jamie had gone to work with his brother. On arrival they encountered the Earl of Eglinton, fresh off his second term of running Ireland for Queen Victoria as her Lord Lieutenant in Dublin. The jovial Eglinton spotted Willie and said, “Jamie, how are you?”

“I’m not Jamie, m’lord. I’m Willie.”

“Confound you fellows! You’re alike as two peas.”

Autumn rains drenched the links on the day of the Open, leaving the players to splash through puddles in Tom’s fairways. Markers again followed Tom, Willie Park, Bob “The Rook” Andrew, the Dunns, and the other cracks to make sure they didn’t cheat, while the eight amateurs were trusted to keep score on their own.

In less than an hour it was clear that the gentlemen were no match for the cracks. Fairlie would post the lowest score by an amateur—twenty-one shots behind the Belt-winner. The Dunns, too, fell back in a hurry. For all his brilliance in match play, Willie Dunn could not last thirty-six holes of stroke play without stumbling, not at his age. Dunn, a decade older than Tom, finished seventeen strokes off the lead. As for the Rook, he hung close for two rounds but could not hit the ball high enough to make up strokes on Prestwick’s uphill holes. He came in fourth, shaking his head.

By midafternoon several hundred spectators had abandoned other groups to follow the leaders, Park and Morris. The previous day Park had gone to the treasurer of the Prestwick Golf Club and handed over the clanking silver and red-leather Championship Belt, as he was bound to do or else pay a £25 penalty. The treasurer placed the Belt on the long table in Prestwick’s clubhouse, where it dared the professionals to claim it. Park boasted that he would take it back to Musselburgh, and for most of the day he looked as good as his word. With twelve holes to play, Park led by three shots while Tom stayed close in second place, tacking his way from one safe spot to the next. Then Park reached the second hole of the final round, the treacherous Alps Hole, where Tommy liked to run and tumble downhill. With his usual brio, Park tried to clear the hole’s mountainous dunes in two. To succeed he had to go 385 yards in two clouts of a gutta-percha ball that might fly two hundred yards if Hercules hit it. According to the
Fifeshire Journal
, “a daring attempt to ‘cross the Alps’ in two brought Park’s ball into one of the worst hazards on the green, and cost him three strokes—by no means the first occasion on which he has been severely punished for similar avarice and temerity.”

While Park’s hopes sank in the huge Sahara Bunker, Morris tick-tocked his way home and reached the last hole with a cozy lead. Or so it seemed. The
Journal
reporter saw him “driving a magnificent ball from the teeing-ground towards home.” But the shot was unlucky, landing “in a bed of fog at the edge of a pool of water…. spectators thought that Tom would pick out the ball and forfeit a stroke.” Instead he courted disaster. The most careful of golfers found his ball, gave it a wallop and “with a self-reliance rising to the emergency, he dexterously sent it bounding into the air.”

Tom won by four strokes. His score of 163 was eleven shots better than Park’s winning total the year before. That score put paid to the notion that amateur golfers might be as skillful as the cracks. At its highest level, golf was already a game for professionals.

Willie Park went home empty-handed while Tom took the Belt uphill to his cottage, a journey of a few hundred yards, and put it on his mantelpiece under the looking glass. The Earl of Eglinton took the train from Prestwick to St. Andrews, where he was joined on the links by R&A members, including James Balfour. As Balfour wrote in his
Reminiscences of Golf on St. Andrews Links
, “Lord Eglinton…. expressed his delight with the scenery at the High Hole—and indeed he frequently admired the whole landscape, as the descending sun lengthened our shadows on that October afternoon.” After dinner the Earl felt ill, but soon found his usual good humor and said he was right as rain, but “while the butler was helping him on with his great-coat, he fell down in a fit of apoplexy, was carried to a bedroom, never spoke again, and died two days after.” The thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, dead at forty-nine, was honored with a statue that still stands in the west-coast town of Ayr, just south of Prestwick. Friends including Napoleon III of France and the heartbroken Colonel Fairlie chipped in to pay for the statue, which shows Eglinton holding a scroll, looking stone-faced out to sea. It is a more reverent monument than the Eglinton statue the Irish built in Dublin. The one in Dublin, blown up by the IRA in the 1950s, showed the sporty earl with a deck of cards in his hand.

Not far from Scotland’s Eglinton Statue stood a school called Ayr Academy. Founded in 1794 as a warren of schoolrooms under a thatched roof, the academy could trace its roots to a school founded in 1233. It secured a royal charter and in 1810 moved to a building that cost a princely £300. Half a century later its students included Colonel Fairlie’s sons, the children of other gentlemen, and a contingent of lower-and middle-class youngsters. One of the latter was Tommy Morris, who on school days—Monday through Saturday—traded his little-boy sailor suit for the jacket and tie of an academy scholar.

Tommy knew he was fortunate to be going to school with the Fairlie boys. If he forgot, his father could remind him that lads his age worked hand looms from sunup till dark and thanked the Lord for the work. Other boys sweated through twelve-hour shifts in smoky factories. One government report found a young nail-maker paying a high price for doing shoddy work: “Somebody in the warehouse took him and put his head down on an iron counter and hammered a nail through his ear, and the boy has made good nails ever since.” Five-year-old chimney sweeps toughened their skin by rubbing it with strong brine and holding their arms and legs to the flames of a roaring fire; if they flinched, their bosses, who were often their fathers, stood ready to beat them. It was illegal for boys of five and six to work as sweeps, creeping up narrow, filthy chimneys, but the law was often ignored. Older boys would stand below the youngsters, “encouraging” them to climb by holding lit matches to their bare feet.

In the 1860s only one in 140 Scots attended secondary school. A tradesman’s son who succeeded at one of the country’s handful of “famous academies” would be thought of as a “lad o’ pairts” whose virtues offset his lack of social standing. The rise of the clever, industrious lad o’ pairts was as mythical as that of plucky American boys in Horatio Alger’s tales of the same time—for every bright lad who rose from rags to riches, tens of thousands lived and died in rags. Yet here was young Tommy Morris, bypassing the Prestwick Burgh School by the links, a lesser school, to make the three-mile trip to Ayr, a port town bisected by a muddy river dotted with swans. Here a boy could study navigation, astronomy, and bookkeeping as well as Latin, mathematics, and science, which was then called natural philosophy. Classes began at seven in the morning. Discipline was strict, with schoolmasters beating and flogging students who got out of line. One spirited boy endured fifty lashes before he spun around and bit his teacher’s leg.

Tom Morris scrimped to pay the school’s fees of twelve to fifteen pounds a year, and six mornings a week Tommy made his way three miles down the coast to the academy. He may have hitched a ride on a delivery wagon to get there, bouncing down the firthside road along with milk cans or jostling heaps of turnips. He may have walked for an hour. Either way he reached the destination his father and mother wanted him to reach: At the age of twelve, Tommy was better educated than either of them. They joked about how he could chatter about Ajax and Alexander, Hector and Achilles as if they were golfers from the next town. Their son would not have to be a caddie and greenkeeper. He wouldn’t need to be a crack, living on wagers. Tommy Morris could be what he chose to be.

Still, the boy had to eat. He needed food, shoes, jacket and tie, pencils and schoolbooks in addition to his academy fees, and he was but one of six Morrises in the cottage across from the Red Lion Inn. The task of feeding and outfitting them all fell to Tom, who was now in his early forties, flecks of gray in his hair. A Scotsman of his era had a life expectancy of forty-one, but Tom showed no sign of slowing down. Every dawn he rose from his bed beside the cracked-open window and dressed for his morning ablutions. He padded down the links to the shore, where he removed his coat and hat and placed them on high ground. Under the coat he wore a long-sleeved bathing costume of dark blue linen with nine buttons up the front. It weighed twenty pounds when wet, which it soon was. Without hesitation Tom plunged into the Firth of Clyde, which was cold even in July. In January and February the shallows froze over and he had to walk across ice to reach frosty water. A Prestwick memoirist wrote, “We recollect a gentleman staying in a cottage shouting out one cold, frosty morning that there was ‘a man on the beach trying hard to drown himself.’ It was only Tom Morris breaking the ice to enjoy his usual morning dip in the sea.” Tom emerged shivering, hungry, and eager to do a long day’s work.